2017 NSF CAREER Award Recipient

Dr. Hung Cao, March 2017

Hung Cao has received a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant from the National Science Foundation. He hopes the $549,000 is just the beginning.

Cao could use more support as he pushes the bounds of science. This five-year award will allow him to establish a competitive engineering team, which could attract more funding for long-term projects for his research group. It's developing tiny electronics to monitor the hearts of zebrafish. Why zebrafish? Their hearts can regenerate after a 20 percent loss. Human hearts can’t. What if the genes that regenerate damaged heart tissue could be activated in people who suffer heart attacks? Read full article by Doug Esser. Photo by Doug Esser.

2015 NSF CAREER Award Recipient

Dr. Kristina Hillesland, Biological Sciences Division, April 2015. This CAREER award is the third to be received by a UW Bothell faculty member over the last three years

Kristina Hillesland, an assistant professor in UW Bothell’s School of STEM biological sciences division, studies the interaction between microorganisms, with the goal of understanding how evolution affects and is affected by the interactions between species. She says this research can be the basis to understanding a great deal about evolution, “If we ever want to find or confirm general biological principles about species interaction evolution, we must consider microbes.”

Dr. Hillesland says the biological world is full of interesting traits that result from the interactions of one species with another. For example, some microorganisms are known to be predators, others cooperate. Read full article by Lisa Hall.

2014 NSF CAREER Award Recipient

Hazel Asuncion, Ph.D., Computing & Software Systems, February 2014: In a world where scientific research is increasingly data-driven, Asuncion’s research focuses on the crucial interplay between data and software in eScience by using a conceptual framework, iProvenance. This framework provides the ability to model and capture software-centric and data-centric information in tandem and develop powerful yet accessible automated provenance software for scientists in various domains.

The origin of a data set or the processing steps applied to a data set is referred to as data provenance. Data provenance is necessary in assessing a data set’s integrity and in supporting repeatability of analyses or experiments.

"Receiving this CAREER award is certainly an honor," says Asuncion. "I am excited to use this funding to propel our research on eScience and software engineering at UW Bothell and to support our undergraduate and graduate students involved in this research." Read full article by Lisa Hall.